Do We Annoy God By Using the Bible To Solve All Our Problems?
Meditations — By Larry Shallenberger on May 13, 2012 at 4:57 am
Is it okay for a pastor to wonder if the way we handle the Bible doesn’t make God grind his teeth a bit?
I’ve mentioned in other posts that I’m sorting out my spirituality and trying to work some (much) legalistic thinking out of it. Last week I read A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard and the Christian Life by Don Veinot, Joy Veinot, and Ron Henzel. In my late teen and early college years I worked in at Christian Camp that prided itself in using Gothard’s Teachings as the guiding principles of their ministry and life. Going back and reading this book reminded me of the relationship they had with the Bible. They read the Bible as if its primary purpose was to serve a highly detailed moral handbook.
Four steps to root out bitterness.
Three steps to anchoring your self worth in Jesus.
Goals that any one can get behind. Never mind that while the Bible warns about the dangers of unforgiveness and tells us to place our identity in Christ, the book conspicuously lacks a by the numbers methodology.
Somewhere along the line, Gothard… and the Ranch…, got lost in their list and began to read the Bible as medical and dietary guide. Gothard started publishing pamphlets about the dangers of the medical establishment. Bill decided that the Bible should be read as a medical handbook. He started finding homeopathic cures in the Bible, mandates about male circumcision, and restrictive guidelines for how often and when married couples could sheet dance.
I had a friend who decided to live at the Ranch as an apprentice. Years later she told me that pepper was a banned cooking ingredient as it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. One of the wives who set herself up as an authority/prophetess taught fashion color analysis seminars, with a “Biblical twist.” She discerned which colors were spiritual and which weren’t.
I know. It’s so bizarre that I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that I ever got sucked up in the that cult-ish world. It’s easy for me to point to those wacky fundies and shake my head. And then I look at the ways we handle scripture.
The Book of Ruth becomes a guide for dating instead of the female counterpart to the Book of Job, a profound portrait of the tension between suffering and God’s goodness.
We write books about “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” instead of reading Genesis and accepting that both genders are given to us as gifts.
We treat the Bible like a parenting and marriage handbook and look for DIY advice. We create an ideal family and miss the stories of the wildly dysfunctional families that God mercifully allowed to play major roles in salvation history.
We “Daniel Fast.”
We frustrated each other in our attempts to find the one perfect way a church should be governed.
The Ezzo’s, God bless ‘em, discovered the Levitical basis of scheduled breastfeeding as a way to prevent children from becoming secular humanists.
We fund a man who is neither a trained scientist nor a trained theologian to build a Creation Science Museum so we relieve the mental tension between the Creation account in the Bible and evolution. We don’t consider that God didn’t write Genesis 1 and 2 as a preemptive strike against Darwin. Instead we the Bible as a science text book and generate suspect science of our own. Take that Galileo.
Meanwhile, God counts from ten to one, taking long drawn out breaths between each number. He gave us his scripture to point us to Jesus. He told the story of why things are not the way they should be and everything he’s accomplished to destroy that problem. He asserts his divine authority over us by telling his story and demanding that we find our place in it.
Deep down, we aren’t comfortable with the freedom that comes with improvising our place in God’s story. Moral fences provide so much more security. Reading the Bible as a science book keeps us from struggling with complex ethical decisions. Ironically, in our efforts to escape the intolerable freedom that comes with living in God’s story, we enslave ourselves with the very text whose authority we run from.
What if part of the price that comes with believing that the Bible is the authoritative word of God is to accept the freedom and responsibility that comes with it?
This article originally appeared at www.larryshallenberger.com.
Tags: bible, Biblicism, Bill Gothard and the Christian Life
4 Comments
Oh, Larry. Sounds like we’ve been slogging the same trail, my friend. I was trained as a child (at its transition from Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts to Institute in Basic Life Principles) in the way I should have gone, and when I grew I up I departed from it. And I think I’m a better follower of Jesus for it.
Undoubtedly many have been helped and/or hurt by IBLP’s teaching. The outcome seems to be based on personality or family system. I surmise that it’s much easier to produce a list of principles for raising godly children or being happily married if you’ve never been married or had children yourself (which I believe is true in Gothard’s case). I just pray people don’t feel guilty when it doesn’t work out, because as you point out, the Bible tells the big story of God and his world and invites us to find our place in that story. Amen and amen.
I love that you addressed this balancing act vs. black & white. I aim to live out my faith by embracing that God is most glorified when we seek His Face, depend on Him as the living being He IS daily, and fully appreciate the intimacy of His Redemption that He offers daily. This includes staying alert to what He wants to teach me as I’m reading a familiar scripture or reading a section of the Bible I don’t remember ever reading before. Even with this approach, I find I am occasionally challenged by who rely on the Bible as a literal rule book. Most recently, I attended a gathering to learn about a community of young Christ followers who are living in community (completely)with each other. They aim to re-create what the early church probably looked like. I was not even considering joining them, just seeing what I could learn from them. I am divorced and it was made clear to me that if I joined their community, they would not support me in re-marrying because to re-marry would be “unbiblical.” Really? I allowed myself to sit in that question and prayed about it for a week or so, though I was tempted to dismiss that idea immediately out of pure selfish desires that I DESIRE to re-marry. But what I kept hearing from God is that their mandate claiming re-marrying is “unbiblical” (and I can totally see where they get that from scripture- so I’m not saying they are crazy)- leaves no room for God to redeem my broken heart and my broken marriage as He sees fit for ME, it edges out the intimacy God craves to have with me. SO, I also resonate in what John says above- that it is easy for them to establish that principle because they are young and either have never married or have only been married a couple of years. So, I continue to depend on God for the Intimacey of His Redemption and learn from the Bible what that has looked like for various men and women since time began.
My pastor is of the firm belief that Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived, not just in general wisdom/morality, but intellectually too. It was a challenging thought for me when he first said it. I realized that part of the challenge to my accepting this idea is because, if that’s so, then I would expect all God to put all of the answers to everything in the Bible. Specific, “It goes like this and only like this,” answers. And because if He really knew all the answers, He would tell us all the answers, right? Where’s the chapter in the Bible on astrophysics, please? But I’m becoming more convinced that it really is wisdom on His part that His answers about life are not so specific. He keeps the majority of His mandates to the intent, the heart, behind whatever actions we are doing: love, humility, compassion. The specific dos and don’ts actually make up a pretty small list, and even those we haven’t really done yet: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, give shelter to the homeless (no modifiers on these mandates, by the way, like “Only if you think they deserve it,” or “Only if the government hasn’t yet created an XYZ program to help already”). Let’s start with what we do know and go from there before we get wrapped up in making long, drawn-out, specific “Do things this one way and only this one way” to-do lists for ourselves. It’s futile and distracting to actual transforming work of God in our lives.
Great article as usual Larry. It sounds like myself, you, and many others have had a paradigm shift on how we view scripture since the zealous days of our youth.
I remember (many years ago) when I was in college and extremely active with a campus ministry. My primary view of Scripture was that it was an instruction guide for me for how “I should live my life”. (notice how many personal pronouns there were in the last statement). I (we) was not completely wrong, the Bible is full of instructions that I (we) should listen to but that is not its primary purpose. I now believe that the primary purpose of the Bible is to be a history book. A history of God’s Faithfulness and Love to a very indigenous people. Time after time after time God is faithful and Loving to unfaithful and stubborn people.